Film, Media and Representation in Postcolonial South Asia Beyond Partition

This volume brings together new studies and interdisciplinary research on the changing mediascapes in South Asia. Focusing on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, it explores the transformations in the sphere of cinema, television, performing arts, visual cultures, cyber space and digital media, beyond the traumas of the partitions of 1947 and 1971.

Through wide-ranging essays on soft power, performance, film, and television; art and visual culture; and cyber space, social media, and digital texts, the book bridges the gap in the study of the postcolonial and post-Partition developments to reimagine South Asia through a critical understanding of popular culture and media. The volume includes scholars and practitioners from the subcontinent to foster dialogue across the borders, and presents diverse and in-depth studies on film, media and representation in the region.

This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of media and film studies, postcolonial studies, visual cultures, political studies, partition history, cultural studies, mass media, popular culture, history, sociology and South Asian studies, as well as to media practitioners, journalists, writers, and activists.

Introduction — Moving beyond Partitions: Theorising the Academic Dialogue Part I. Soft Power: Performance, Film and Television 1. Trouble in Paradise: The Portrayal of the Kashmir Insurgency in Hindi 2. The Vale of Desire: Framing Kashmir in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider 3. Finding Comfort in Silence? The Absence of Partition Narratives from the Contemporary Group Theatre in Kolkata 4. The Rise of the Celebrity Anchor in Pakistan’s Private TV: The One Voice that Kills Other Voices Part II. Art and Visual Culture 5. Discourses on Partition through Visual Culture 6. Post-71: Photographic Ambivalences, Archives, and the Construction of a National Identity of Bangladesh 7. Speaking Soon after Catastrophe: The Partition Art of Satish Gujral and S. L. Parasher as Record, Testimony, Trauma Part III. Cyber Space, Social Media, and Digital Texts 8. Politicising the Body of the ‘Other’: India’s Gaze at Pakistan 9. Keyboard Nations: Cyberhate and Partition Anxiety on Social Media 10. Pakistani Literary Digitalisation: “Mediascaping” Mohsin Hamid’s “The (Former) General in his Labyrinth”. Conclusion — Reflections: Building Bridges

Nukhbah Taj Langah is Associate Professor of English at Forman Christian College University, Lahore, Pakistan.

Roshni Sengupta is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Middle and Far East, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland.